Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, the last major opposition group standing, faces existential dilemma
- As Albert Ho and others prepare for jail, the city’s oldest opposition party must choose whether to take part in elections most of its supporters now see as meaningless following Beijing’s clampdown
- Boycott the vote and it will please supporters but the camp may not survive; engage and the party may survive, but its support may not
Veteran Hong Kong democrat Albert Ho Chun-yan, 69, is struggling to get used to his new pair of plastic black-framed spectacles that lend him an oddly bookish air.
Gone are his signature metal-framed glasses. Hong Kong prisons ban personal items with metallic parts and Ho’s wife of more than three decades, Tang Suk-yee, told him to get used to wearing the new pair early.
It was a scorching Sunday afternoon last weekend when Ho met This Week in Asia at his flat in Tin Hau, near Causeway Bay.
Stacked on the dining table in his home were a pile of books he planned to read in prison.
From the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in his study, holding his vast collection, he has picked a biography of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion, Wayne Morrison’s Jurisprudence: From the Greeks to Post-Modernity, Nelson Mandela’s Conversations with Myself and the Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber.
